Graphite Stain - Raining Over Clay

On Rotation: Graphite Stain "Raining Over Clay"

"Raining Over Clay," the inaugural Graphite Stain release, captures a harsh tempest of nature-paying respect to war existence is equal to consumerism, built from constant migration and freedom. The event, released 7th February 2025, is a sonic tempest that bellows, bursts into life with blinding glory.

As soon as the SLAYER-esque crushing intro riff starts, tension hangs in the air like a cloud of smothering evil. Ambience is given by the ominous rocking guitar chord that heralds something slowly. There's a hook pierced by vocals-barren, brutal, with the multi-layered poliorcetic trash played at cool, almost whispering confession to the blackness of long dark nights. A deranged screech carrying ghastly kind of angelic sound is conjured by a certain nervous beauty that pulls the listener to the core of the song. Speed brews all the way through to the end, so that it ultimately accelerates to the pace of speech, spoken with desperate panting-a desperate like a praying into the blue, inciting a god-in-arms to something destructively concrete.

The bridge is almost a relief from despair hung like Damocles's sword over one's head: relief before the inescapable fall. A form of scream, flying, alternating binary to create a frenzied montage of shattered vocal lines punctuated with otherworldly harmonies. More like the unleashing of an exorcism of stifled anger, fury, and brutality to describe birth, death, a constant relapse in life that bites much harder. Even the title itself, "Raining Over Clay," meets it head on-an under the skin euphemism to the raw bare obsession of nature crying out for her own, it leaves her out of control in lethargically relentless guitars and buried intensity throughout the track. With their first album closer to release, Graphite Stain is breaking the misconceptions that have pigeonholed them as yet another metal group, when really they are sound craftsmen. Raining Over Clay, if it's anything to go by in the future of metal, will be just a wonderful sweet surprise for the world. Hold on tight!